https://readywriting.org/https://readywriting.org/favicon.pngreadywritinghttps://readywriting.org/Ghost 2.15Fri, 22 Feb 2019 08:16:54 GMT60I organized the apps on my phone the other day. And then I organized my dresser. And then, I organized my calendar.

Now, I should note, I was also procrastinating about doing other, more pressing, but less interesting thing.

I organized the apps on my phone the other day. And then I organized my dresser. And then, I organized my calendar.

Now, I should note, I was also procrastinating about doing other, more pressing, but less interesting thing.

I didn't want this to be another hot take on Marie Kondo and her Konmari method of cleaning up. I watched a couple of episodes not for the tidying up part, but for the deeper reasons as to why there was so much stuff to begin with (hint: there are some terrible husband's out there, but also deep wounds around gender and identity). I get chills every time she greets a house. But I know myself - I will never be that neat and tidy and orderly. Ever. EVER.

Nor do I want to be.

Going back over some of the things (ok, the two things) I've written about this topic (Letting Go and Messy History), I was struck by my conclusion in both: that we get to choose what we let go, what we let in, what we choose to prioritize. For too many years, I beat myself up because I couldn't get organized, couldn't stop "hoarding", couldn't stop buying, couldn't stop anything. It was a vicious cycle of self-punishment, which just lead to more "bad" behavior.

I was really, really good at self-destruction.

I can watch a show, now, like Marie Kondo's latest, and watch it without anxiety, because these shows are for neurotypical people. I am not a neurotypical person, and that's ok. This is huge for me. And it might be huge for someone else, which is why I'm writing this.

I've always loved clutter. It calms me. Like a lot of things about people with ADHD, this seems counter-intuitive, but it works for me. My stuff makes me feel better, makes me feel safe, makes me more productive. And this, of course, isn't universal for everyone with ADHD, but it works for me, it brings me joy, so I stick to it.

I have impulse control issues, which is why I buy a lot of things I don't need. But my brain thinks we do. It needs the thing. So I buy the thing. I'm better than I used to be, and I've started being able to let clothes, especially, go when I don't need/wear them anymore, but my brain still loves to compulsively shop, to seek, to find that perfect thing.

I know I am not alone in this pursuit, but the ADHD makes it hard(er) to resist the compulsion. Will-power just doesn't work the same way with my brain. I've learned to work around in to a certain extent, but really, I'll keep struggling with it. At least my husband has the same compulsion with books.

I hate it when I walk into someone's house and inevitably the mother says, "sorry for the mess" when their house looks about a million times tidier than mine. I hate that it's mom who says it. I hate that we feel obligated in our society to say it (I've been guilty of apologizing, too, for the same reason). I understand some people care; a male acquaintance once came over to our house for a dinner my husband organized the same weekend I was coaching at a meet, and I had warned my husband that any cleaning would be up to him, but that wasn't good enough for said acquaintance who called another mutual friend after leaving our house and eating our food to complain about how messy I was.

Not that I'm bitter.

No, I literally don't care about how untidy your house is. As long as there isn't rotting food and vermin, we're good (and even then - you should have seen the place my husband lived when we first met). I know it's a low bar, but I literally don't care. It's not one of the things that my brain can work itself up into enough focus to care about, or really even notice. If anything, it feels more homey, more welcoming to me.

But again, that's just me.

And I know that many of the strategies that Kondo suggests just won't work with my neurodivergent children. My son knows, he KNOWS that all of he things have a place; when he gets home from school, his shoes go into a shoe rack slot, his jacket goes on the coat rack, and his bag goes in the closet, all of which are within three steps from the door, and on the way to the bathroom.

Guess where all his stuff is when he gets home, every. Single. Day.

By the time he gets out of the bathroom, he's forgotten about his stuff, walking over them, not noticing, and then starts watching YouTube. Telling him no YouTube or XBox until his stuff is put away does nothing because he literally doesn't remember that his stuff is or isn't put away, or that there is even any stuff at all. I am guilty of the same things, walking over messes because I literally just don't notice, or get distracted while trying to clean up (everything is always half-clean) and then forgetting what I was doing.

It's also why some of my sentences take off in two different directions; I literally forget where I was going mid-sentence sometimes.

We are also a family of people who have very strong opinions about where things "go" - the argument "IT DOESN'T GO THERE" never made sense to me as a kid, and it makes even less sense to my kids when it comes to their own stuff in their own spaces. Their bags look like my bags and their rooms look like my room used to, and as much as I enjoy listening to my daughter and husband fight over where things should go in her room, in terms of where it makes the most sense, most of the time, I get that, well, in their minds, that is in fact where it goes, no matter how nonsensical to us, because that is where it makes sense to them.

My kids are now old enough that they have chores, like unloading the dishwasher and keeping their rooms "tidy" ("Mom, I don't have any swimsuits!" "YOU HAVE SIX." "Oh, yeah, they're under my chair, never mind."), flattening recycling, and my son does the bathrooms while my daughter sweeps the whole house once a week. Between swimming and coaching and ballet and working and writing and travel for work, we don't want to use what little chill time we have together arguing about making our house spotless.

Maybe it's because I'm almost sort-of 42 now. Maybe it's coming to terms with who I am and who I shouldn't bother trying to be. If going all Kondo on your house brings you joy, then go for it. I'll take my joy where I can find it, too.

]]>I took a break from writing over the month of December. I mean, I still wrote things for work and I still tweeted and I still wrote FB posts and I still wrote emails (so many emails) but I didn't write anything here or on my tinyletter or for Popula]]>https://readywriting.org/unexpected/5c2bacda83e8510001b00ed2Tue, 01 Jan 2019 18:50:10 GMT

I took a break from writing over the month of December. I mean, I still wrote things for work and I still tweeted and I still wrote FB posts and I still wrote emails (so many emails) but I didn't write anything here or on my tinyletter or for Popula or work on my manuscripts (!!!). Between the impending (and now completed) move and the holidays and a couple of work deadlines, I didn't have the bandwidth to really write anything, not anything I would feel happy about putting into the world.

I also just needed a break.

I took to Twitter to do a quasi writing year-in-review (here is the thread) and like always, I surprised myself by just how much I wrote in 2018. Surely, I could take the month of December off and not feel bad about it! Surely I could take a step back and be proud of what I produced!

Spoiler: I still felt vaguely bad about the month break and that what I did accomplish in 2018 wasn't enough, feelings left over from being in academia for so long that any time not spent writing is time wasted and potentially career-killing, but I've already killed my career, so what does it matter?

2018 was the probably the most unexpected year I have had in my life. I never thought I'd be teaching and writing about Quebec again, but found myself doing exactly that, which led to a book proposal that was accepted about growing up in the West Island in the 1980s and 1990s.

I never thought I'd be working at Georgetown, and yet here I am, getting ready to start the next six months of a job that I am enjoying, not to mention at a school that will basically pay for my two kids to go to college, and now no matter what, I'll be there until they both get undergrad degrees, which is fine by me, I need to stay in one place for a while.

This year was also humbling. I finished two manuscripts that I thought were good enough, but they aren't, and that stung, and I've revised and revised and revised and they still aren't good enough, but I had to take a break, put them aside, and just get ready to come back to them with fresh eyes and an open heart. At least, that's my theory. But if this year, I put as much effort into revising them as I did into writing them, then I think I have a shot to make them what they need to be.

I'm trying not to make too many plans for 2019. I want to work on these two manuscripts. I'd like to get an essay into Rites of Passage on NYT. I will probably become a citizen this year (interview is scheduled for the end of the month!). In terms of my mental health, I'm in the best place I've been for a long, long time. I have a therapist again. I'm about to have two kids in double-digits age-wise, and if the son's tween years are as...intense as my daughter's have been, well, it's best not to make too many plans.

But he's still swimming and she's still dancing and I'm still coaching, so that's all staying the same, but at different places than before. I've never been called the answer to anyone's prayers, but when I called this new team about possibly coaching, that's what my call apparently was. And despite some early trauma, we found a place to dance where I think she can flourish.

The start of 2019 for me is a weird liminal space for me: nothing is coming apart but nothing is also coming together, not yet, so on this first day of 2019, I wait. There is literally nothing I can do in this moment but wait and see what happens in 2019, with no expectations, because if 2018 taught me anything, it's that often being ready for the unexpected is better than planning for what you think might happen.

]]>"You always look so pulled together. How do you do it?"

I've been doing a little project this semester on my instagram account, taking a picture of myself every day wearing a different dress to work. I did this in part because I wanted to wear all the dresses I

I've been doing a little project this semester on my instagram account, taking a picture of myself every day wearing a different dress to work. I did this in part because I wanted to wear all the dresses I have in my closet, but I also wanted to be body positive, also posting the size of the dress I was wearing (usually 14, L or XL), and if it had pockets.

Spoiler alert: most didn't have pockets.

My kids are now on instagram, and I wanted to show my kids, too, that beauty comes in all shapes and sizes and styles. That one does not need to be perfectly lit, at the perfect angle, and have a "perfect" body to look and feel good. This is particularly important to me because my daughter is almost 12 and practices ballet and I want to inoculate her as much as I can from toxic body shaming.

The weather has changed, and so I have a few dresses left that I haven't worn/documented, I want to be wearing pants and sweaters right now. But I'm still motivated to create different outfits every day, to have some fun with my wardrobe, to help me feel "pulled together."

My ADHD makes me feel, most of the time, like I am not pulled together, but it also makes me an impulsive shopper. Being of average size according to population but not according to retailers makes me loyal to particular brands that I know fit me and look good on me (Universal Standard and Elie Tahari on super-sale), so I have a reliable stable of dresses. I also got obsessed with designer collaborations with mass-market retailers (like Target and Kohls), so I have a lot of really nice stuff that makes me feel good.

I also did a massive purge of the clothes that no longer made me feel good, which helped.

I never, ever, ever really cared about clothes. My style was "swimmer chic" mixed with some grunge. Basically everything was too big and athletically inspired or plaid. I've also gained and lost weight so many times that clothes have long been a source of stress for me, punctuated every spring with a session where I would try on my pairs of shorts and cry because they no longer fit.

My daughter has ALWAYS cared about clothes. She has been choosing her own unique outfits, parading around in them, since she was old enough to do so. Looking through pictures of her on my phone, I find so many of her posing like she is in a fashion magazine, which mystified me; I don't buy fashion magazines, and this was before she was online and consuming most of her media from YouTube. No, she came out a fashionista, at one point even aspiring to be a designer.

She has also been a consumer of makeup. When you start dancing at age 5, you learn quickly about makeup. I had to learn quickly about makeup. I never bothered with makeup growing up because of swimming; why would I spend any time doing my makeup when I was getting right back in the water? Also, swimming makes your skin super-dry, and leaves nasty goggle marks under your eyes.

I have also always looked younger than I am. Even in college, wearing makeup would lead me to get carded because I looked like a 15-year-old trying to look like I was 18 by wearing makeup. I felt like a Barbie doll, or like a little girl who got into her mother's makeup. It just wasn't me.

When it came time to put makeup on my daughter, I had to go out and buy what was needed, and re-learn how to use it. My daughter, on the other hand, has become a pro in the meantime. She has watched YouTube tutorials, practiced with her friends, and even practiced on me. Her favorite thing to do is to do my makeup for me.

So, in the spirit of the 2018 purge, of books, of clothes, of all the things I didn't need anymore, I also got rid of all of the random makeup I had collected over the years from promotions, free-with-purchase, or just impulse buys. If I was going to participate with my daughter in something she enjoyed, then I was going to do it right.

Well, at least right for me.

My daughter and I don't share a lot in common, in terms of shared interest. My son and I share swimming and watching hockey. My son, daughter, and I watch So You Think You Can Dance together, with both kids having sneaked out of bed to watch it with me when they were old enough. Now I just let them stay up. But fashion and makeup and ballet? Never really been my thing. But it's important to me that my daughter and I can have shared experiences and shared interests to talk about, so I started caring more about my clothes and makeup.

I am more purposeful, now, in terms of what I wear and my makeup. It's a little time for me in the morning before the stress of the day wears me down. The kids are old enough now that I can just remind them to eat and make their lunches, rather than supervising them. Getting dressed and doing my makeup has become an act of calm self-care, a brief moment for me.

I like sharing new eyeshadow pallets with my daughter when I get them, playing with shades and blending and brushes. I like it when she tells me I did a good job on my makeup, and I even enjoy it when she turns her nose up and tell me that maybe I should clean my face and try again. She does it as kindly as a tween can, but also from a place of love, where she just wants to help me. I am modeling how she can receive loving criticism in the meantime while she supervises the re-application.

I never thought I would become a person who cared as much as I do about what I wear and how I look, enhancing it with makeup. There are part of the way I look that I still don't care about, at least not as much; I only get my hair cut twice a year, corresponding with whatever major special event happens to fall during that period (lately, summer weddings and Christmas parties). I don't shave my legs. I have no desire to learn how to contour my face (that seems REALLY labor intensive).

If I appear more pulled together now, more so than ever before, it's because I have someone in my life for whom being pulled together for is a way to connect. But I also want to show my kids that they can be themselves and beautiful on their own terms. I don't want to inspire them to be like me when they grow up; I want them to be inspired to be like themselves.

]]>Baby Lion has been an integral part of the family since my son was born. We just didn't know it at the time. He was one of the first stuffed animals that was gifted to my son, one of many, however, sent to us by a family member before my]]>https://readywriting.org/letting-go/5bcf3ef5692b9e00018d8ac3Tue, 23 Oct 2018 19:23:08 GMT

Baby Lion has been an integral part of the family since my son was born. We just didn't know it at the time. He was one of the first stuffed animals that was gifted to my son, one of many, however, sent to us by a family member before my son even born. He was among the many stuffies who lived in my son's crib with him (don't worry, on the opposite side of the bed from where he slept). I can't pinpoint the moment however when Baby Lion became Baby Lion, the most important, beloved stuffy, official 5th member of the Bessette family. His status was cemented, I think, soon after our move to Morehead. My son was also about 8 months old, so cognitively, ready to form real attachments to things.

Baby Lion is, as you can see from the picture, well-loved. He is almost a decade old, and wears every single day in his appearance - a bald spot, a matted mane, a scare from when he burst open one night causing my son to scream in a way I only heard again from him when he broke his arm. He has survived multiple bouts of stomach flu, the one time we got lice, being carried around by our dog, being misplaced multiple times at preschool, and the one time he got lost in our house, which caused immeasurable tears, but also marked the beginning of our son's epic stuffed lion collection.

We're getting ready for yet another move, and each time we move, we prepare the kids for the inevitable purge of things that are no longer of use - toys and books they have aged out of, clothes that no longer fit, stuff that is broken and just never put in the trash. It's not easy for them - my daughter is far too attached to things than we would like. Everything (and I mean everything) for her is special. And in a way, it is, because she can tell a story, real or imagined, about almost every item she has kept. We negotiate limits and rules and guidelines (one box to keep, one box to display, the rest toss away) and no matter how much we get rid of, her room seems to spring new clutter overnight.

My son, on the other hand, is an easier sell, except when it comes to his lions. "Mom," he asks me nervously, "we're never getting rid of Baby Lion, are we? He's a part of the family!" I assure him that Baby Lion and his pride of lion brothers and cousins will always come with us, for as long as he wants them. I often know how my son's day went by how quickly he grabs Baby Lion when he gets home, having left him on the couch in the morning when he leaves. It's been a really bad day when I find him at bedtime surrounded by a fortress of lions in his bed. There have been a lot of fortresses lately, with the move coming up. He is scared he won't make any new friends. He is tired of moving.

Funnily enough, I find myself in a position I never thought I would be in every again: doing what my graduate work taught me to do, which is explain Quebec professionally to people. I am doing in it two ways - writing for Popula and teaching an online course on Quebec language and culture. It is a side-gig, two projects that I started before landing my current job, but fun enough that I want to keep doing them because, well, it's what I was "trained" to do. But I also find that, well, I don't actually need those books anymore to do this work.

I imagine that as he ages, my son will let go of most of his lions, perhaps giving them away to younger family members or the kids of close friends. When we left Morehead, we left most of the non-lion stuffies for the pre-school the kids attended. They liked knowing that their toys were still going to be loved and played with. Their books and toys this time will be donated to the Children's Hospital, where my son received such good care when he broke his arm, twice. But Baby Lion stays with us. He's too important.

I think part of me was clinging on to the books because I wasn't ready to give up that part of my identity. Hanging on to those books meant that I was still, somewhere, a Comparative Canadianist (which, haha, that's silly). But it isn't. Not really. I spent from 1999 to 2007 studying Comparative Canadian Literature, since 1996 if you count my BA. That's a long time. I've left and let go of a lot of things in my life - my hometown, my home province, my home country. This includes friends and family that while are still near and dear to my heart, they are so far away. I carry them, which is invisible, and I carry the books.

So maybe I've finally realized that I don't need to carry the books anymore. The books are buried in my basement; no one sees them, and really I only know they're their, or care that they're there. So I did it. I organized them, boxed them up, and I found a place that wants a collection of Canadian and Québécois books (the place who I am teaching the online Quebec language and culture for; the chair really wants them - he also once shared an old blog post of mine on social media and was reminded of it and shared that with me which was nice).

I kept the Anne Hébert books, and the Kim Thuy books, the Nalo Hopkinson books, and the Dany Laferrière books, along with a couple of books and novels about or set in Montreal, because they are a larger part of my identity, books about home, books that I read and studied and wrote about and internalized. But the rest, I boxed up and am getting ready to send on their way. Those books weren't as much a part of my identity. They were my constant companion, and I thought a source of reassurance and comfort. But they shifted into being a burden, and so it is time to let them go.

When my son does something wrong, he punishes himself, throwing Baby Lion into the hall and telling me to give him away, that he doesn't deserve him anymore. I always rescue him, bring him with me, tell him that I am going to keep Baby Lion for myself if he doesn't want him anymore. He always ends up taking him back, hugging him tightly, asking me to give Baby Lion one more kiss goodnight. One night, I had to reassured my son that he could, indeed, bring Baby Lion away with him to college, to leave him up on a shelf, as a piece of home. That there are things we will never fully let go of, objects that represent our past, our lives, ourselves. Those are the things we should always carry with us.

The best part is, though, is that we get to decide.

]]>My swimmers had an amazing meet this past weekend. They all got at least one best time, and most of them got at least one cut time (which is ultimately meaningless, but goal times are goal times and it keeps them motivated, so ultimately not meaningless at all). This is]]>https://readywriting.org/learning-to-breathe/5bc5e88558cca300011a8833Tue, 16 Oct 2018 14:34:48 GMT

My swimmers had an amazing meet this past weekend. They all got at least one best time, and most of them got at least one cut time (which is ultimately meaningless, but goal times are goal times and it keeps them motivated, so ultimately not meaningless at all). This is my third year coaching some of these kids, and they have come a long way. I have come a long way.

One struggle that most swimmers have at this age and level is hanging their breath when they swim freestyle. Ideally, swimmers should sneak their breath, turning their head slightly in sync with the rhythm of their stroke and body rotation, suck in a breath and then put the head back into a neutral position, never breaking the stroke rhythm. I have a video I show the swimmers of an Olympia who is breathing every other stroke but he does it so quickly, you can't even tell.

My swimmers show their whole face, almost turning on their backs, when they breath. The rhythm isn't smooth, but instead a stroke-stroke-BREEEEAAAAATH-stroke-stroke-BREEEEAAAAAAATH. As I watched swimmer after swimmer hanging their breath at the meet, I sighed and audibly said to no one in particular, "Well, we're going to have to work on sneaking our breath in practice." One of my coaching colleagues overheard me and said, "I wonder if she's holding her breath. Did you tell them to breathe out?"

No one teaches you how to breathe in swimming. For years, I would get out of the water after my backstroke races gasping for breath, legs shaking, unable to walk. The strongest part of my stroke was my kick, and your legs have some of the biggest muscles in your body, needing the most oxygen. My legs should be hurting if I was swimming my hardest, I should be breathing heavily, but this was something different, a burning in both my legs and lungs that I didn't experience when I swam freestyle or butterfly. How was it that the one stroke where your head is almost never underwater, I was unable to breathe?

Turns out, I was hyperventilating; my coach finally asked me, when I was 16, after I had been swimming for 8 years, when I breathed when I swam backstroke. In and out every stroke, I said. He shook his head and laughed at me. No, he said, you need a breathing pattern like in all your other strokes. In for one, out for two. I had always been a backstroker and no one had ever told me how to breathe. The next meet, I went a best time for the first time in ages, and I could finally get out of the water and walk to talk to my coach. I had to learn how to breathe.

For swimmers, if they hold their breath when their head is under water, then they have to both exhale and inhale when they put their heads up. I know this, having told many swimmers that exhaling was as important as inhaling. They needed to make room in their lungs for the new air to come in, that if there is already room, it makes sneaking their breath that much easier. They also need to control the exhale so that they are breathing and not gasping when they come up. I know this, and yet had forgotten to teach my swimmers that lesson.

My son last year swam his first (and so far only) 200 free. Your breathing pattern in races is part of your strategy. Generally, the longer the race, the more often you have to breathe. An Olympic 50 free swimmer won't breathe at all during their race. But while swimming an 800 or 1500, even an Olympian breathes every three or so strokes. The 200 for my son was the longest he had ever raced, so more like a distance race than a sprint. I didn't think I needed to tell him how often to breathe; at that age, they usually forget what you told them and breathe whenever they need/want to. And the more tired they are, the more often they breathe.

Halfway through the race, the other coach and I noticed he was laboring, badly. And then we noticed he wasn't breathing all that often. We counted - he was breathing, consistently, every seven strokes. Even on his last 25, which looked like it hurt a lot, he kept dutifully breathing every seven strokes. And that breath lasted a good half-second, at least. When he got out of the water, he was exhausted. I asked him why he breathed every seven. He didn't even realize he had been doing it. Of course, it was all my fault because, "you didn't tell me when to breath!"

Our instinct is to want to breathe, and when we can't, to hold our breath. Our instinct is to do what needs to be done in order to get a breath; this means that in strokes like butterfly and breaststroke, you have to teach the kids that their goal is not, in fact, to bob their heads up and down in order to breathe, but to propel themselves forward in the water. That their heads come up at all is incidental. Take advantage and breathe, but don't make it the focus of your stroke. Forward, not up, I tell them.

There is an analogy buried in this reminder about not knowing how or when to breath, that the breathe doesn't come naturally for many swimmers, that you need to tell them, to remind them when to inhale and exhale, and how often. That breathing isn't the goal, but the means to an end. How we breathe in the water is different than how we breathe on land.

I can't tell right now if I am starting a long inhale or exhale. I've put aside my multiple manuscripts and have started to read again, voraciously. I haven't read this much in years. I'm reading about writing, about editing. I'm reading other people's memoirs, I'm reading as much as I can about where I grew up when I grew up there. I'm still writing, obviously (1000 words on breathing!), but it's a different kind of writing, compared to what I had been working on for the past six or so months. It's a necessary moment, an inhale to my exhale of words. Breathing words in, fill my brain, process them, gain strength from them, breath different ones out. And yet somehow it still feels like an exhale, a moment of calm.

In talking with a friend yesterday, she put into words something I didn't even realize I was struggling with: I don't know how to be a person with my ADHD under control. In some ways, the medication is like when my coach finally told me how to breathe in backstroke; HOLY SHIT, it didn't have to be this hard, to hurt this much. In other ways, I feel like my swimmers who are unsure when to breathe in, when to breathe out, how often to breathe, like my son in his 200 freestyle: he'd never done it before, and no one told him what to do, what to expect, so he was out there on his own, doing the best he could.

I'm learning how to breathe again. I know how to be a person who is not depressed, not anxious, because I remember those times when I wasn't those things. I have never not had ADHD. Or rather, I've never not been at the mercy of ADHD. So when I take my pills, it's strange because I don't know how to feel the way I feel, how to deal with it, how to enjoy it, how to harness it.

I don't like driving, for instance, after I've taken my medication. I learned to drive with ADHD, and I've driven my whole life with ADHD. I don't feel comfortable driving on the medication because it doesn't feel like driving has always felt for me.

I also don't like "wasting" two hours of medicated time during my commute. I still associate taking my ADHD medication with being productive, rather than just being well.

I'm learning how to breathe again. And there isn't a coach there to tell me, here's how you do it.

]]>I wish I could remember why I chose Lyle Odelein as my favorite player on the Canadiens. He was an old-school defenceman, tough and reliable, with many, many penalty minutes each season, but a player that could be relied on. He wasn't flashy, although he did score a hat-trick once]]>https://readywriting.org/my-favorite-hockey-player/5bb6324dd94456000118f7d5Thu, 04 Oct 2018 18:43:43 GMT

I wish I could remember why I chose Lyle Odelein as my favorite player on the Canadiens. He was an old-school defenceman, tough and reliable, with many, many penalty minutes each season, but a player that could be relied on. He wasn't flashy, although he did score a hat-trick once which absolutely delighted me. Somehow I ended up with his rookie card, and one year for Christmas, I got an Odelein jersey from my then-boyfriend. I watched him win the Stanley Cup in 1993, watched the hat-trick game, followed his stats, payed attention when he was on the ice, and just decided, yup, this guy is my favorite. He was drafted 141st overall for goodness sake! Maybe it's because he was, well, kinda funny looking. Maybe because there were better, cuter, flashier players on the Canadiens at the time, but teenaged me choose the one who was none of those things, but successful and respected nonetheless.

I am compelled to try and remember why I gravitated to him after reading about how Odelein recently almost died. On October 11th, the Canadiens will celebrate the 1993 Cup winning team (before a game against the Kings, no less #burn), and Odelein will be there, and I will be watching, in my jersey, trying not to cry. I hope the Bell Center raises the roof for him. That whole team was special, but knowing now that Odelein almost died (seriously, it's worth the subscription to The Athletic just for the description of his harrowing and completely unexpected ordeal) makes me appreciate him all the more.

*********

I've been recently writing for a new online publication, Popula, and my beat so to speak has evolved into explaining Quebec to not-Quebeckers. I'm also teaching an online course on Quebec language and culture. It just so happens that Quebec had an election where a center-right party took control of the National Assembly and the hockey season started the same week that my students are reading about the Richard Riots and the 1960s and 1970s nationalist movement, just after learning about Duplessis.

The students are researching things like poutine and smoked meat and Carnival and Quebec's unique education system and the Habs (why is the nickname for the Canadiens "the Habs" anyway?) and the Alouettes for their final projects. No one chose the Expos, unfortunately, but someone did choose Expo '67. They all have lovely ways of pronouncing the names of people and places and things that they always apologize about in their videos. I'm trying to get them to connect the various phases and movements within Quebec's history to their own experiences and culture, their own connection with language and religion and place.

I'm also writing a memoir right now about the year 1995 in my life. I'm finding myself re-immersing myself in Montreal, in Quebec, in ways that I wasn't expecting, but obviously needed to do. I joked that my MA in Comparative Canadian Literature is FINALLY paying off, 20 years later, where I am finally professionally employed to do what my degree trained me for, explaining Quebec to people.

I have a long history of explaining Quebec to people. I started having to explain to people where I was from when I was 17 and started CEGEP. I was from the West Island, the cluster of Anglophone suburbs on the western end of the Island of Montreal. I went to CEGEP downtown, in Westmont, the place where very wealthy Anglophones lived. I had to explain that no, the West Island wasn't just farms and summer homes and an airport. They called it the Waste Island. These people were rich, they traveled (I know because they would always be casually mentioning all the places they had been and by the way where had I been?), did they not notice all the houses they flew over when they landed at the airport?

When I went to Sherbrooke for university, I had to explain where I was from, yet again, assuring some of my classmates that, yes, I am Anglo, and yes, I am from Quebec. I had to explain that the Island of Montreal wasn't the entire city of Montreal (not yet, anyway), and that there was a place where we all lived on the island. They all explained not-Montreal Quebec to me. I read and read and read Québécois literature from all over the province, made friends with people from everywhere in the province and beyond, listened and learned.

And then I went to Edmonton, Alberta, to do my PhD, and found myself teaching comparative Canadian literature to undergrads. This is really when I started explaining Quebec to people. Alberta in particular had a certain view of Quebec, but didn't know a lot of the history of the province and the people and the culture. So I explained and taught and read and wrote. I studied translation and thought about issues of transculturation, appropriation, and audience.

And then I moved to the States to start all over and left Quebec behind, literally and figuratively.

*********

The Canadiens were the last Canadian team to win the Stanley Cup. It was 25 years ago. I was in grade 10, or Sec IV as we called it. They won 10 games in a row in overtime, a feat that has never been repeated. It also meant there were a lot of late nights staying up watching hockey. The Finals themselves, against the Kings, who at the time had the greatest hockey player of all time on their team, were right during final exams. We showed up for our science exam the morning after the Habs won, and our science teacher hadn't slept all night, having been at the game and then caught up in the subsequent riots. He had on his official Stanley Cup champions t-shirt, and we could all barely contain our excitement as we tried to concentrate on our final exam.

A few days later, we ditched out of our math final exam after only an hour or two and my dad drove me, my best friend, her boyfriend, and my boyfriend in his red Dodge Colt two-door hatchback downtown for the parade. We were at the end of the parade route, and by the time the parade reached us, the players were so drunk they could barely stand, let alone hold the Cup over their heads in celebration. We have pictures of all the players drunk out of their minds, covered in beer, but none of the Cup. My dad took a picture of Patrick Roy holding the Cup up at the beginning of the parade off the TV recap later that night, just so we had one.

It was the last time a Canadian team won the Cup. It was the last time the Canadiens won the Cup. The Habs have won the most Cups, are one of the most decorated professional sports teams in North America, if not the world. The years ticked by, and once we crossed the "longest period between Cups" threshold, it seemed (and still seems) that we may never win another one. Entire generations have no memory of their hockey team winning the Cup.

*********

I can't really blame anyone for not knowing where I grew up, where, exactly, I am from. There are so many books about different parts of Montreal, so many different insider accounts of the city, from Mordecai Richler to Leonard Cohen to Michel Tremblay to Rawi Hage to Gabrielle Roy and everyone in between. Montreal, especially in the 1990s, was a dark, dangerous city. It is an interesting city to write about because of the clash of peoples and languages and religions.

No one has ever written about the West Island. It isn't so much of a clash of anything other than a group of people steadfastly resisting...something. We were never on the news much save for a moment in the 1990s when the "Angry Anglos" or Anglo Rights Activists were making noise about protecting the English language in the province, largely in the West Island, but also in the richer western parts of the city, like Westmont.

When I began really studying Quebec literature, I was most drawn to novels set in Montreal by immigrant writers. I devoured La Québécoite by Régine Robin and Comment faire amour avec un Nègre sans se fatiguer by Dany Laferrière among others. The way they described Montreal was as outsiders looking in, the same way I felt about the city I grew up adjacent to. I was an outsider looking in. Robin imagines three different lives for herself trying to integrate into various Montreal communities, while Laferrière spends his time sleeping with rich, white girls from Westmont, girls I recognized from CEGEP.

I didn't realize that I was looking for a book that described where I grew up, where I lived, in this strange in-between place, an Anglophone enclave in a Francophone province, a largely ethnically homogeneous place right next to the multiethnic city. It's not like that anymore, and it probably wasn't even that way when I was growing up, but a child's view is as narrow as they are allowed to travel, and at least my neighborhood was largely white, middle-class, and Anglophone. Most of the neighborhoods we circulated in where as well.

Nothing I ever read in literature ever felt like home to me.

**********

I went to Sherbrooke in 1996, one year after the Quebec Nordiques moved to Colorado, one year after Patrick Roy, two-time Stanley Cup champion with the Canadiens, was traded to those same Colorado Avalanche, the year that the Avalanche won the Cup themselves.

For most of Quebec's history, Les Canadiens were Quebec's team. It was always stocked with players from all over the province, and stood in for national pride, something that Quebec could claim was there's, that they could claim to be better than anyone else in. But Montreal was being increasingly seen as not-Quebec, not really. And in the 1980s, kids my age in the rest of the province had a team they could call their own, the Nordiques. It was also a rebellion against their parents and grandparents who were largely still Habs fans.

Most of my friends in Sherbrooke grew up cheering for the Nordiques and transported their fandom to the Avalanche. So many of them also chose Sherbrooke because they didn't want to go to the big city, to where (as one of my classmates put it) "all the immigrants and punks lived." It wasn't really Quebec to many of them; too much English, too many immigrants, too many accents that weren't Québécois, too much urban, too much crime and debauchery.

They were some of the same arguments my own parents had made when they forbade me from traveling with friends into the city while I was a young teenager. Certainly, the Hell's Angels and Rock Machine gangs were busy blowing each other up. And yes, unemployment was high. And yes, tensions were high between Anglophones and Francophones at that moment. But we never ventured further east than Peel unless we were going to see the Expos play, and even then, you just popped out of the metro and you were at the Big O. And so far east that you had crossed back over into suburbs.

My friends and I argued in university, relatively good-naturedly, about how the Avalanche weren't the Nordiques, that if they were still in Quebec City, the Canadiens would never have traded Roy to them, and Roy was the only reason the team won the Cup. They would just shrug and say that we were dumb enough to trade Roy away to begin with, and I didn't really have an answer. Little more than 20 years later, we would make another stupid trade, and while it hasn't quite bit us in the ass the way the Roy trade did, I often wonder if hockey isn't too much of a religion in Quebec that it would trade away one its best, most charismatic players because he's unapologetically Black.

*********

I'm writing a book about growing up in the West Island.

It's not just about growing up in the West Island. It's about being a Bill 101 baby, growing up in the shadow of the 1980 Referendum, of being adjacent to Montreal during the 1980s and 1990s, of having one parent who was from the same place as the Prime Minister of the country, of voting for the first time in the 1995 Referendum, about choosing, less than a year later, to go to a French university, about moving out west thereafter, about discovering where I am from along the way of explaining it to other people.

It's about religious school boards and swim teams and summer pools and the 211 bus route and CEGEP and lifeguarding and Fairview and cheap Tuesday movies and an arcade and Annie's and The Pioneer and Barenaked Ladies and Tragically Hip and Moxy Fruvous and hockey and soccer and Lakeshore Road and rants and MusiquePlus and Les Boys and Jean Leloup and Les Colocs and La Vie, La Vie and Watatatow and Fête Nationale and Vieux Quebec and Les Marches and Les Nerds and Nick Auf der Maur and Red Fischer and Jack Todd and Pulse News and Degrassi and the Expos and the Alouettes and the 90s tech boom and being from a specific place at a specific moment in history.

I realized as I was thinking about pitching this book that I have been working on this from the moment I started at Sherbrooke. My first magazine by-line was a piece in Swim World about the summer pool system I grew up with. I've written about language and culture and public transit and living in two languages and translation and representation and music and sports and public transit and...it's all up here in my head and in my heart. I just need to get it down on the page.

I thought at first that 90k words would be too daunting, too many words for what I was trying to do. Certainly, I wouldn't have THAT much to say about growing up in the suburbs. And then I go and write almost 2500 words just like that. So, maybe it isn't so far-fetched that there is something here.

It's about trying to figure out why Lyle Odelein is my favorite hockey player. Call this a really rough first draft to go along with all the other first drafts I've been unconsciously writing all along.

]]>This is a post that first appeared as a part of Digital Writing Month in 2012. Since it only exists it in the Internet Archive and I was recently haunted by the memory of writing it, I'm re-posting it here. I can't believe it's been almost six year since I]]>https://readywriting.org/plant-a-tree-start-a-forest/5b9d80e33d606a0001f36e18Sat, 15 Sep 2018 22:06:55 GMT

This is a post that first appeared as a part of Digital Writing Month in 2012. Since it only exists it in the Internet Archive and I was recently haunted by the memory of writing it, I'm re-posting it here. I can't believe it's been almost six year since I wrote this. Obviously, I've written A LOT more than that during the intervening six years, but the analogy still stands, and I am particularly proud of this piece.

I’m absolutely horrible at telling stories.

This might seem like a strange admission from someone who reads and writes about (among other things) stories, as well as having a pretty high profile blog that melds the professional with the personal. But if you were to ask anyone who knows me in real life, they will all have at least one unfortunate experience with me trying to tell a story and doing it badly. When I speak a story, it grows and grows, twisting and turning, full of tangles like an out-of-control vine; my stories are less unified, linear narratives, more a long series digressions, asides, and tangents. The vine will overrun whatever space is left for it; my words overrun the silences and spaces with their unruly form.

Traditional writing, however, has long for me been like keeping an indoor collection of plants. My undergraduate education was in professional writing, where I learned to prune and crop my writing, turning it into an elegant little bonsai; deceptively simple-looking but hard to accomplish well, often coming from a clipping of something larger. Academic writing allowed for more room, but the conventions of the genre made it challenging in different ways; prickly cacti mixed in with strange exotic orchids. Academic writing also made it difficult to really see the connections between these disparate little pots, all growing in their allotted spaces, cut off from one another except for their geographic proximity. And only those who would take the time to come into my house would ever see the whole, understand the complete picture as I have cultivated it. Most of the time, these plants existed only for me to see.

Digital writing, however (and in this I am specifically talking about blogging and tweeting, but I am also an active Storify user [RIP Storify]), has allowed me to create a forest out of my writing, out in the open spaces, individual trees growing together, roots and branches intertwining, with entire ecosystems teeming around them. There are different types of trees, some large, some small. It’s a story that is always growing outwards, upwards, downwards, but each tree can be appreciated on its own. I can digress (through links) to my heart’s desire. I can dig into the archives, reach out into my community, feed off of the words of my friends and foes alike.

We speak about networks and webs, but I prefer to think about forests and trees and the life that they sustain, providing oxygen, shelter, food, raw materials, and perhaps most importantly, beauty. My life has been enriched by the forest that has grown from my digital writing, particularly those who have nurtured its development. It has, in some ways, taken on a life of its own, growing in unexpected directions and supporting an ecosystem I could never have planned or even imagined. I am continually surprised by what comes out of this forest, but also what I find there as I continually explore its depths.

My contribution to the forest is: 435 posts, mostly on my blogs, but also includes guest posts and other digital writing; 47,641 (and counting) tweets, which includes founding #FYCchat and participating in various other Twitter chats (like #digped or #dayofhighered); 24 stories on Storify; 147 comments on Disqus and 93 others using another name; and one Xtranormal (RIP) video. But it only grows from there; this doesn’t include the hundreds and hundreds of comments on my various posts, the thousands of pageviews, the tweets and retweets, the links to my blog, and blog posts directly and indirectly inspired by what I have written (again, I’m particularly proud of #dayofhighered’s reach). Even three of my hard-to-find academic papers, those poor little potted plants, that I posted on Academia.edu (since deleted my account) have received almost 2000 views, joining the forest. This is the first time I’ve ever listed all the various trees in my forest, measured how big they have become, and I am awed by what it has grown into.

It isn’t coincidental that one of the first posts that resonated with a (small) community is about trees and their resiliency. It was this post where I finally found my voice as a digital writer. There are no links. There are only two comments. It isn’t even in one of my top-ten most-viewed posts. But, for me, it was a chance to explore, create, connect, and just write in a way that I had always wanted to but never thought I could. It was one tree, hanging on to the edge of a cliff, hoping it wouldn’t fall into oblivion, that started this forest. From one tree.

Go forth and create your forest.

]]>I'm sitting in my new office overlooking the Potomac, at my new job, at one of the most prestigious universities in the world. Nine years ago, I was getting ready to move across the country, having given up my tenure-track job that I had held for only a year. This]]>https://readywriting.org/moving-up/5b6ddb2e7b9f860001a52038Wed, 11 Jul 2018 19:22:08 GMT

I'm sitting in my new office overlooking the Potomac, at my new job, at one of the most prestigious universities in the world. Nine years ago, I was getting ready to move across the country, having given up my tenure-track job that I had held for only a year. This isn't new or news; it's a story that I have told and re-told so many times over these past nine years. But I didn't think that I would go from working contingently at a regional comprehensive serving the poorest zip-codes in the country to where I am now. I didn't know that this would be the end of that story, and the start of a new one.

The past couple of months (has it been months?) have been a whirlwind. I had to finish all of my summer writing/work projects in a matter of weeks, and so I put my head down and just wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote. I got everything done. I taught workshops. I attended conferences. I took a kind of vacation. I worried about where we would live and then how we would commute and what we would do with the kids. I worried about not coaching anymore. I had blinders on, really, to much of the stuff going on around me. And I didn't think too long or too hard about the career move I was about to make. I was changing jobs. Again. This was just something I did.

And it was for more money. And it allowed for us to move closer to where my husband also works, to cut down on the commute he's been doing for three years. The schools my kids will be going to are better. I get an amazing dependent tuition benefit, meaning that I don't have to worry as much anymore about paying for the kids' college. These were all the rational, logical reasons to take this new job. It made sense for our family.

I didn't think too much about what it meant, professionally, for me.

I have trained myself to put all of those concerns aside. It had to make sense for my family before it made sense to my career. It has always been that way, since I gave up that tenure-track job. I put family first. I moved so my husband could take a tenure-track position. I moved because it was better for our family to live in the city. I moved because my husband needed us to be close to DC so he could get a job there and leave the toxic one he was in.

And while those moves did make sense and helped my career in ways that I never expected, it was never really about me. Not in my own mind, anyway. And so this move was no different for me, not really, not at first. This made sense for our family. It ticked all the boxes (except the kids are going to have to switch schools mid-year, which, especially for my middle-school starting daughter, no ideal) and so of course I was going to take it.

I wasn't prepared for everyone else's reactions. When I told people where I was going to work, their demeanor towards me changed immediately. Swim parents who were polite, but not particularly warm to me started to talk to me. Colleagues eyes would get big and they would suck in their breath in shock and happiness. When I went to HR at my old job, the person stop dead to ask me if I was an alumni, as people never jumped institutions like I just had, unless they had connections. I did have connections, but not the traditional kind.

I didn't really understand their reactions. I've always had trouble internalizing the importance of hierarchies, actually understanding, and thus respecting, them. It served me well when I first got on Twitter; I treated everyone like a colleague, and I didn't care where you were from - I was going to talk to you. That worked both ways. I approached people who I probably had no business approaching, but in return, I also befriended people who didn't ever expect me to befriend them. At conferences, I tend to end up hanging out with the graduate students because I never could maneuver the politics of full versus associate verses assistant versus superstar versus nobody. We were all academics, we we all colleagues.

Stop laughing at me.

I've been in my new job for barely a week. I am no longer rushing around trying to finish things, not to mention that more than half the office is on vacation, so I have time and space, finally, to reflect. I think it really hit me when I was on the shuttle one afternoon to meet my husband at his job so we could commute home together. The trip takes me through some of the memorials in DC, and I looked out the window at them, thinking, this is my life now. I work in DC. I work at Georgetown. This is who I am, this is what I accomplished, this is me now. I did this.

And, at the risk of being accused of being an #ImmodestWoman, it is a big fucking deal.

I only sort-of got that being on IHE was a big deal. I still laugh when people are like, you were in THE CHRONICLE! And part of me, I don't think, will ever really understand why people lose their minds when they hear I'm at Georgetown. But, here I am - I did it. Sure, yes, it helps the family, but this a true moment of personal and professional success for me. Just even typing those words is a big deal.

So I look out over to Potomac while I type this, enjoying the view and the natural light streaming into my office, savoring, for a brief moment, my success and my accomplishments. There is the commute to face, the kids to deal with, the natural growing pains of starting a new job, not to mention the work itself, but right now, I am selfishly allowing myself to think about how far I've come.

Facebook had replaced much of the emotional labor of social networking that consumed previous generations. We have forgotten (or perhaps never noticed) how many hours our parents spent keeping their address books up to date, knocking on doors to make sure everyone

Facebook had replaced much of the emotional labor of social networking that consumed previous generations. We have forgotten (or perhaps never noticed) how many hours our parents spent keeping their address books up to date, knocking on doors to make sure everyone in the neighborhood was invited to the weekend BBQ, doing the rounds of phone calls with relatives, clipping out interesting newspaper articles and mailing them to a friend, putting together the cards for Valentine’s Day, Easter, Christmas, and more. We don’t think about what it’s like to carefully file business cards alphabetically in a Rolodex. People spent a lot of time on these sorts of things, once, because the less of that work you did, the less of a social network you had.

Facebook lets me be lazy the way a man in a stereotypical 1950s office can be lazy. Facebook is the digital equivalent of my secretary, or perhaps my wife, yelling at me not to forget to wish someone a happy birthday, or to inform me I have a social engagement this evening. If someone is on Facebook, I have a direct line to them right away — as though a switchboard operator has already put them on Line 1 for me. Facebook is one step away from buying my kids their Christmas presents because I’m too busy to choose them.

My mom, and her mother before her, every year would transfer events from one the previous year's calendar to the current one. Birthdays, marriages, deaths, job milestones, and other various dates to remember would be moved from one calendar to the next. Sometimes my grandmother would gift my mother said calendar, with her messy script covering the top of more days than not on each page. Now, my mom's impecable handwriting is what covers most days. It still lives on the same spot on the fridge, near the top. head-height to be able to best see it.

This was, and almost always has been, as the piece points out, women's work. My brain, my ADHD brain, does not work this way, and I have struggled my whole life, even before facebook, to keep dates straight, remember birthdays (I forgot my best friend's birthday a record 5 years in a row), don't remember addresses (an up-to-date address book is always something that would get re-done every few years by my mother and grandmother). Instead, I'd have post-its stuck all over a bulletin board behind my computer monitor with phone numbers and email addresses. I always felt like I had failed at one of the most important parts of my "job" as a woman, a wife, a mother.

I've alway sbeen terrible at remembering names and dates and numbers, let along the names and dates and numbers involving my kids' friends. Because I have been in school for so long, I remember things by when they happened during the semester, what it corresponds with according to the flow of the work that is happening. As soon as the kids get their school calendar and activities set, I write it all on the family shared calendar, pushed to all my devices, and my husband's. I never want to be surprised again with, "Remember, I told you about this..." again.

What I was good at was taking pictures, snapshots with my instant camera, making scrapbooks, collecting ephemera, amd telling stories with them, from them. I wrote letters and journals and poems and press releases and op-eds and news reports and everything in between. I debated and did public speaking and taught and sang and spilled over everything and everyone, for better or worse.

I'm not lazy, I'm just not as interested in these kinds of familial record keeping. That calendar was almost the only thing that recorded my family's history. There we so few stories, only moments and events, without context, written every year on a cheap calendar. And even then, those moments are highly curated, subject to what my grandmother and mother decided was worth marking as an event. The calendar was the limit of our family's history to be passed down from one generation to another.

There were whispers, to be sure. But the added emotional labor that I inherited from the women of my family was silence, to be a secret-keeper, not to speak of anything beyond what the calendar said. I never learned how to do many of the things that the author writes about because we never did them ourselves. We covered ourselves in a lead blanket of silence, of secrets, of shame, of wordlessness.

So if I reject the lists, the calendars, the addressbooks, all impecably written and preserved, I also reject the silence, the secrets, the shame that came along with them. The stories I wanted to hear and the stories I wanted to tell could not be contained inside those small boxes, organized neatly by date or in alphabetical order. I will leave traces of myself on facebook, on Twitter, on my blogs, in my writing, traces of our family, traces of our history, littering the web and pages with us.

I get to choose the emotional labor that I do now in the service of my family and our history and my friends and the ways I show that I care and am thinking of people. I am not a 50s housewife or secretary, but neither am I the lazy 50s husband or boss. I am imagining a different way.

]]>

I wrote myself into existence, literally, from early journaling to what you see here #WhyIWrite

I have written a version of this tweet a couple of times on Twitter, and it has been my pinned tweet for a while now. I meant this in a very literal sense - starting in grade 7, I was constantly writing and keeping a journal.

But even before that, I wrote my first "story" when I was in Grade 1 (in French no less) about an elf at Christmas. It wasn't for an assignment. I just wrote it because I wanted to. My teacher made it into a reading/language comprehension test (which, now that I write it out, sounds horrifying, but at the time I was REALLY flattered of course). I got a poem on the Honor Board in Grade 6. I wrote press releases for my swim team throughout high school, most of them making the local paper.

I have kept all of those journals from high school. On top of the journals, I wrote notes to my friends. Long, elaborate notes. I mean, letters really. I don't have the notes I wrote, but I have many of the responses. We even have a whole notebook of notes because at one point we thought that would be less conspicuous than little folded up pieces of paper. 13 year olds aren't the sharpest knives.

I collaboratively wrote fan fiction on my friend's old Apple computer at sleepovers, for Star Trek: TNG and Young Riders (she loved horses). I don't know what ever happened to those, obviously, but if it had been just a few years later, we could have shared them on a BBS of fan fic (and probably learned really early just how horrible the internet can be to women and girls).

And then I wrote poems, largely post-high-school. I didn't realize just how many poems until I went exploring through some of my "archives" yesterday.

And I know I'm MISSING another collection of poems I wrote post-September 1995 (Why I Write in Pen and Other Poems - I remember the title). I wrote A LOT of poems. Usually (as you can see in the background) during class on pages in my notebook that I would then tear out and type into a word processor (probably Word because late 90s!) and then save onto a diskette that I carried around with me everywhere (I still remember I wrote "My Poetry" on the label in green pen). The diskette is long gone (I left it in the lab one day), and I don't think I have a complete print-out of all the poems I wrote and saved.

But holy shit that's still a lot of poems.

Things I also found, written post-high school, pre-grad school:

four incomplete novel manuscripts

two completed plays

six short stories

seven full journals

Keep in mind, I was writing much of this while going to school full time, swimming 30+ hours a week, and (for a time) commuting to and from school for more than two hours a day, on top of a reasonable social life. When was I writing? Insomnia helped a lot, as I wrote at night when I couldn't sleep. I also wrote a lot during class which might explain why I almost (should have) failed Chemistry and Physics. And took two creative writing courses (which is more stuff that I saved and on which I got really positive feedback, so maybe I was on to something, which then I gave up because GRAD SCHOOL).

Oh hey, I also found my first by-line:

So when you see that I have 153K tweets, three+ blogs with hundreds of posts (and my work writing for WIHE, ProfHacker, and the DTLT Blog, among other places I can't even keep track of), a number of academic articles and books, know that this verbosity has always been my MO, except that now, most of my writing is public, rather than private.

Don't even get me started on the emails I've written over the last 20+ years, either.

I have spent my entire life writing. My. Entire. Damn. Life. But not only have I spent my whole life writing, I am a hoarder of words, my words more specifically (although we do have A LOT of books in the house, too, that we keep carrying with us from place to place). My husband keeps "threatening" throw out "all of those stupid notes from high school (hey, dude what about your SEVEN BOXES OF NOTES FROM UNDERGRAD). What are you going to do with that, he keeps asking.

Well, as it turns out, write a memoir. Specifically about 1995, but also about remembering and healing and a lot of other stuff. Finding my journals and poems and other ephemera from 1995 is making it MUCH easier to reconstruct 95 (tentative title!), and for the first time since I pitched the idea (and had it accepted!), I'm really getting excited about writing it.

As opposed to crippled with fear, anxiety, doubt, and, you know, abject terror.

But not only was seeing how much I still had from 1995 comforting (hey, I really did go to that party, and I wasn't THAT much of a shitty friend that I didn't notice all of my friends' relationships disintegrating around me even though I have no memory of the details of either and so THIS HELPS!), but also a reminder that, yes, Lee, you can write. You've always written. And you've always written your life.

I wrote myself into existence. I keep writing myself forward. I can keep writing myself until the end.

I dedicate these remarks to Miranda, to Margaret Mary, to Robert Ryan, to all the adjuncts and contingent faculty who literally gave their lives and lived much more anxious pedagogies than many of us can imagine. These are the three names I know and can speak, but there are countless others who suffer and (yes) die in silence, without health insurance, without financial security, without a voice.

I want to extend a welcome to all of you here today, and not because it’s an 8:30am panel the night after departmental cash bars. No, I welcome you to this panel because you recognize the state of your students, your institution, your colleagues, these states of anxiety and insecurity. Maybe you are even feeling it yourself. Welcome. Welcome to a state that your colleagues and students have long experienced. Thank you for finally noticing. Welcome to the state of higher education that has existed right under your noses for decades.

My pedagogies have always been anxious, and not just because I have been diagnosed with anxiety, although living with an invisible disability is a part of it. As a student, I lived through food insecurity, sexual harassment and stalking, and abuse, on top of studying in a second language. I have taught contingently for the majority of my career, as a non US-citizen. I have primarily taught students who are defined in one way or another as “non-traditional”. I have had students who have left young children with family to pursue their degrees, who lived in their cars, who had immediate family incarcerated, who are sole caretakers for their families, who struggled with addiction, who came back from war and are living with PTSD, who are the only one in their family who can speak English...The list goes on.

We all came to university with one thought in mind: Education was going to save us. In the face of all the other anxieties, education was the hope. I knew what had to be overcome in order to even set foot in my classroom, let alone succeed. It’s what Tressie McMillan Cottom has called “the education gospel” and we believed in it fiercely, however imperfectly. If I stayed in higher education, if I keep staying in higher education, it’s because I still believe in this gospel. I naively still cling to the belief that I can make a difference in a student’s life, in the face of systemic and systematic obstacles thrust in our way.

My current area of research is around affect and how that impacts our work as educators more generally, but as what is loosely referred to as “faculty developers” more specifically. Anxiety is just one of those emotions we as educators are dealing with, both our own and our students’. Another one is love. I think those two things are closely related, as we feel the most anxiety around those things and people we love the most. We worry about the immediate and uncertain futures, not in the abstract, but the concrete as we attach it to something or someone we have a deep investment in wanting to see successful.

I loved my job. I loved going to work and I understood the first week of school that it was impossible to teach any student you despised. A teacher’s job was to responsibly love the students in front of them.

As I was trying to find the article again in order to write these remarks, I misremembered the quote and reversed it, instead searching for “you can’t teach who you don’t love”. Unsurprisingly, I am not the first to think of this:

In higher education, for a long time, we believed instead that we couldn’t teach WHAT we didn’t love. Who was sitting in front of us was immaterial; it was WHAT we taught and how we felt about it that mattered. And I think we see that in how we expressed our anxieties: around disciplinary boundaries, funding, the future of X, the creation of Y, and even when we talk about “students” as some sort of amorphous monolith that didn’t understand or appreciate the greatness of what we were teaching. Here lies the traditional sources of anxiety for some faculty, often the ones who control the narrative around higher education.

Adjuncts, of course, turned that notion on its head and proved that you could teach what you didn’t love if you in fact loved your students instead. Thrown in front of classes to teach a topic we were only tenuously connected to, insofar as we had enough graduate credits hours to satisfy accreditation requirements. Instead, we loved the students. Not uniformly or evenly or perfectly, but as individuals within a system that we were all beginning to recognize as being oppressive and exploitative. Our anxieties weren’t concerned with disciplinary battles, but instead with getting a job, paying bills, survival, and then, hopefully, being able to thrive.

We loved the students in the face of being told we were less-than, that we were expendable, that we were failures. In the face of holding multiple jobs to make ends meet. In the face of our lack of health insurance. In the face of delayed, forestalled, lost, missing, paperwork and pay.

I’ll never forget the fear I felt when paperwork was delayed and delayed and delayed and I didn’t get paid, didn’t have health insurance, and was pregnant with my second child, with the first one at home with her dad, not even two. How would we eat? Was this child I was growing even ok? To those who immediately dismiss my story as bad planning, personal choice, or foolishness, I say, this is nothing I haven’t heard before, from colleagues, from strangers on the internet, from friends, from family, from a college president. Where is your empathy? Where is your sense of solidarity? How is your anxiety clouding your ability to empathize with someone else’s?

Also, this was in a tenure-track position.

It is impossible to teach any student you despise. You can’t teach who you don’t love. Can you learn from someone you despise? This impacts my work now as a faculty developer even more acutely.

How do I extend the love and empathy I showed and still show my students to faculty, faculty who dismissed my own anxieties, my own precarity, my own experience and expertise. Faculty who actively shame, dismiss, demean, belittle students and staff and contingent faculty. My pedagogy and my anxiety has shifted, because I worry about my own perceived lesser position as staff, precarious in a new and different way. But I also now struggle sometimes to find a new way to love, a new point of commonality, a new path to empathy required to do my job effectively.

There are two sides of 2017 for me - before the anti-depressants and after the anti-depressants. That cleaving of the year in two roughly coincides with my son breaking his arm this year, twice, the second time right in front of me. That moment of me, doubled over, hysterically sobbing on the pool deck in front of everyone, is the moment the year broke, the moment that broke me. I wish I hadn't had to wait months and months to see the doctor to get prescribed the medication I so clearly needed.

2017 turned into the year that I was going to talk a lot more about mental health. So I started a tinyletter to do just that. There aren't too many posts there, but I wanted a more intimate space to just share what's going on with my family as we work our way through this. I'll say this here: I'm still getting used to living without the exhaustion that comes with depression and anxiety, using so much mental energy on keeping the excessively negative and destructive thoughts at bay. What can I do with that freed up mental space and physical capacity? I'm still trying to figure it out.

Last year, I was so devastated by the loss of some of my pop-culture heroes, I didn't take the time to look back and reflect on what I had accomplished (which included the publication of my first and probably only academic book). And, you know, actually depressed. And still coming to terms with no longer being an academic. If anything, seeing my book published put a period on my academic career. I had spent so long chasing the next thing, hustling to get out of where I was, I never really gave myself the space to mourn.

It's a process I'm not ready to talk about yet. Or rather, that I can't quite articulate in the right way.

But I keep writing. I write here, on this blog, and I write for my job. I have one last academic article coming out soon that I finally finished this year. They are old words, two talks actually, brought together in one place, and I'm glad they finally found a home. Speaking of talking, I am literally finding my voice again. We started a podcast, Closing Tabs, I was on TV, and I was interviewed by WIHE.

In a lot of ways, this looking back has largely focused on the latter half of the year. Maybe I'm not ready to think about all the things I did (or rather didn't) do in the first half. It's marked by visit after visit to various doctors and too much crying in public and various levels of despair. I'd be remiss not to mention the support I received from my family, my co-workers, and my large circle of social media friends (aka friends).

I turned 40 this year, too. I got to have dinner in Montreal for my birthday with two of my best and oldest friends. I also got to go to Toronto during the spring for a girl's weekend with three other of my oldest friends. I told all of them that back when we were young, I never thought I would make it to 40. I couldn't see myself surviving, I couldn't visualize what my life could be, would look like.

It's a hard feeling to explain, the strangeness of being an age you never thought you would see. It's not that I thought I would die, although I guess one way to think about it was that I couldn't picture myself wanting to live until I was 40. I honestly thought that whatever it was that I couldn't describe when I was younger, the thing that scared me, the thing that increasingly made me feel different and apart from my friends, the thing that alienated me from my family, I thought it would win.

Maybe I thought that while I may have lived to see 40, that no one else would be around me to see it with me.

I celebrated my 40th birthday surrounded by people I love and who love me. It's what I want to remember the most about this year.

]]>I work with a pretty smart data science guy. In the past, when the MLA Conference program hit online, I would enter in words like "teaching" and "pedagogy" and "adjunct" into the search bar and see just how many panels/talks were on these]]>https://readywriting.org/fun-with-mla-and-aha-programs-of-conferences-past/5b6ddb2e7b9f860001a52033Thu, 21 Dec 2017 19:37:21 GMT

I work with a pretty smart data science guy. In the past, when the MLA Conference program hit online, I would enter in words like "teaching" and "pedagogy" and "adjunct" into the search bar and see just how many panels/talks were on these topics. But inspired by Kris, I decided to try and do something more systemic with the data I was finding.

It helped that the MLA has a database of all the conference programs online dating back to 2004. So I made a (really ugly) spreadsheet. And then, I decided I needed a data set to compare the MLA numbers to. Ideally, I wanted to compare the MLA conference with the CCCC, but the CCCC only seem to have archived their conference program in PDF format (all differently formatted as well, but more on that later). Instead, I had to settle for the AHA conference as the point of comparison. The AHA online conference database only goes back to 2009, so it's not a perfect comparison, but it worked for my simplistic purposes.

Methodology

Quantitative researchers, please don't get too mad at me. This was rudimentary research which involved entering in a search term in the search bar and just recording the number of results. I got the total number of session from the MLA by their own counting system (ie scrolling to the last session on the last day and taking down that number). The AHA was a bit trickier because they don't count all of the various allied sessions in their total. So I used the AHA total number and then hand-counted the unnumbered allied sessions. I excluded the entries on this list that weren't sessions (dinners, etc) which I know the MLA counts, so again, it's not apples to apples, but the percentages are so low that at the end of the day, it won't make that much of a difference for my overall thesis.

Wait, what is that thesis (that my friends, is called burying the lede)? My thesis is that the MLA conference doesn't center issues of the most interest and that are most pressing for the (imaginary) membership: teaching and contingent faculty issues. My secondary thesis was that the CCCC did a better job, and maybe someday I'll be able to test that thesis, but for now, I had to see if the historians faired any better than my colleagues in the broad fields that make up the Modern Languages.

Some weirdness in my numbers - first, the MLA didn't have a conference in 2010 because they moved the dates from December to January. Also, there is something odd about the 2015 teaching numbers for the AHA, but I couldn't figure out how to disaggregate what I was actually looking for.

Conclusion? History does WAY better talking about teaching than the MLA does.

I had originally included "labor" as a search term, but the AHA numbers really mess up the data visualization because, I imagine, historians are more interested more generally about labor (and the history thereof) than language and literature people. And that isn't to say that historians are talking about the labor conditions of their colleagues in the academy. So, you can see the raw numbers on the spreadsheet, but for the purpose of a less-ugly bar graph, I've only included "adjunct" and "contingent".

As you can see, it's all over the map, and "contingent" is a much more popular word than "adjunct." But it makes up a minuscule percentage of the total number of panels at the conference. We're still not talking about it. Not much.

Now, of course, there are TONS of limitations on this kind of simplistic and brutalist research. If the data was in better condition, I could do some topic modeling and understand more precisely the kinds of things that are being said in these talks and presentations, at least based on the panel and paper descriptions. Also, the inconsistent formats of the data (and the inconsistent search engines) make it hard to do a true apples to apples comparison.

I know that the MLA has done some great work to make their data more available (and the full MLA conference programs are available in their PMLA format, which has remained extraordinarily consistent), and Kris, inspired by me, has done some more in-depth work in mining the data. But, I'm hoping that organizations like AHA and CCCC do some more work to make their data more available for this kind of investigation. It's important to understand how our disciplines have evolved (or not) especially as it concerns our most important and pressing issues.

So, if you have a better data set, or more data sets, or some influence, please let me know. And feel free to use whatever data I've collected for whatever you want to. It's just a rough start. It might be as far as I ever get with it. But I hope I've inspired some people to ask these questions and come up with better methodologies and answers.

My daughter quit swim team today. Or rather, I sent the confirmation email to the appropriate people that had her removed from my roster (she swam in my group). It's been a tough four months; she does three different activities before school and was swimming or doing ballet every day after school. We were constantly rushing. It was all things she decided she wanted to do. Over the summer we discussed finding a new or different ballet school, or swimming, or doing both. She chose both.

The rule I used to have growing up (and still largely practice and implement with my own kids) is that once they commit to an activity, they have to see it through until the end of the season. Except, with swimming, the season never stops (and I don't pay a penalty for ending the contract early if she quits now). But what made me realize quitting swimming was the best thing for her is the look on her face when she was up on the stage dancing The Nutcracker last weekend.

She was beaming.

While many of the other girls looked either nervous, terrified, in intense concentration (or a mix of the three), her face never wavered from pure joy. I never saw that look when she was swimming, even when she did a best time or won her heat. It's a look I see on my son's face every time he jumps in the water. It's a look I see on my daughter's face when she's performing.

Why should I force her to do something that doesn't bring her joy?

We make our kids do so much they don't want to do, or that doesn't bring them joy because it's what they have to do, especially in school. And as a parent and an educator, I get that. Math isn't fun sometimes. You'll have to read things in Language Arts that you don't like. Science can be a challenge. Writing can be a challenge. We learn to persevere, we learn to adapt, we learn to work differently.

But one thing we should never learn is to normalize misery in the name of some misplaced idea that the more we suffer, the better we are.

I’m on this thought-thread around articulating and naming abuse and not hiding it behind another word or reasoning. And now I’m thinking, why don’t we just call bullying abuse?

As I think more and more about how we normalize abuse in our society, I'm starting to think more and more about how we fetishize suffering. Biggest critique of Millennials? That they're "soft". We talk about how suffering is good for you. No pain, no gain. We must suffer for our art. But what kind of suffering and pain are we talking about? What if there is no joy to accompany that pain and suffering?

So...can we talk about how toxic the academic work environment is then? Even outside of the TT? We’ve normalized abuse. https://t.co/dHNPcbUMhT

I haven't completely left academia, but I quit the tenure-track rat race, the contingent trap. I have a whole set of tabs open on my browser window dealing with feeling like a failure as an academic (and I would recommend that you read all of Lisa Munro as well as this one andthis one. I'm kinda known for writing about failure so much so that at last year's MLA there was a moment of silence, waiting for me to comment when the question about public failures came up.

.@readywriting has been told she is good at talking about what is hard #s248#mla17 “I just thought I was a hot mess.” no, important service

If you can't tell, I tend to be self-deprecating, in no small part because I learned early that if I didn't look like the fool, someone else would damn well make sure that I did.

But that's a whole other blog post.

Anyway, now that I think about it, I am almost always ok with failure, particularly the public kind, because it shows that I didn't quit, and I am not quitting because I'm sharing in order to get better, to learn, to improve. No, quitting is by far the bigger failure, because it means I gave up. What is it, quitters never win? Winners never quit? I was a loser - I quit. I let people down, I let myself down, I violated the sacred narrative of success. Clearly, in my mind, quitting was the failure, a failure much worse than not getting the job year after year of applying.

But why can't I see quitting as a success? As a way that I tried and tried and in the face of misery, put my foot down and said, enough! Is it because in so many ways, teaching still brought, still brings me joy, puts that same smile on my face that I see in my daughter when she dances, in my son when he swims?

But that joy came at what cost?

The price I had to pay for that joy, the price too many of us pay to experience that joy, was too high. So I snapped.

And now I'm snapping again.

I look at my kids, and tonight to my daughter I said this:

I am proud of you for telling me you wanted to quit swimming. I know how hard it was for you to tell me. I saw you smile on that stage when you danced, and I see you at swim meet and at practice. You are never as happy as you are when you dance. I never want you to do anything that doesn't bring you joy.

I don't want you to do anything that doesn't bring you joy.

I want my kids to learn the lesson now, a lesson I didn't learn for a long time, that suffering doesn't make you better. That it is ok to quit suffering, it is ok to quit circumstances that don't bring you joy. It doesn't make them weak; it makes them stronger than I ever was.

I have always been "coach mom" - emotionally invested in my swimmers, and attempting to be nurturing to them and their love of swimming. I'm the "nice one" or, to others, the one who is too easy or soft on the swimmers. I coach 8-11 year-olds - I'm ok with the accusation of being too soft. I run a tight ship, don't get me wrong; there are rules that need to be followed, and I get...frustrated as you do when dealing with a large group of 8-11 year-olds.

I try my best to be supportive, encouraging, and when I get frustrated, I clearly state why, trying to be generous in my description of what they aren't doing well or what rules they are breaking. I try my best never to shame or humiliate the swimmers, and I am always conscious of the line between physically and mentally pushing them in the name of improvement and just hurting them.

But I slip sometimes.

In order to be allowed to coach, I had to take some mandatory training from USA Swimming, particularly around abuse and bullying of the swimmers. It sounds obvious, but one thing became painfully clear as I was completing the course: I had some shitty coaches when I swam. I was body-shamed, bullied, belittled, humiliated privately and publicly, pushed past the point of physically falling apart, and even sexually harassed.

But this was all seen as normal, necessary even, to be "strong" enough to swim our fastest. This is how coaches "got results". And if you broke, then you didn't deserve to be on the team, couldn't handle it, weren't really serious, a failure. For me, it was still better than some of the abuse I was suffering at home.

I would love to say that I stood up for a particular teammate, if not myself, when witnessing an particularly egregious situation, but I can't. What I can say is that I worked in the locker room and in the pool to build up my teammates. After being screamed at, I would whisper encouragement, talk them through the hard set, console them when we didn't make the interval, or after a hard practice or disappointing meet, I would make them laugh, hug them, commiserate.

I quit swimming in college when, after a terrible swim meet, the coach publicly tore us a new one (so to speak) in front of our friends and family and the opposing team. I had been sick, really sick, so clearly wasn't at my best. I sat there, and instead of feeling shame or guilt or remorse, I felt angry. We deserved a dressing down for our performance, but not publicly, not like that. I was done with swimming.

I have long lived and worked in environments where people in power abusing their positions to torment, exploit, and manipulate - all in the name of helping us succeed. Academia is in the middle of it's own reckoning around sexual abuse and harassment, but I am also interested in academia beginning to speak out against other forms of abuse that graduate students, junior faculty, staff, and contingent faculty face from their "colleagues".

It is, largely, normalized. It's understood within the hierarchical structure of academia that the lower you are, the worse you are treated. But why? Because this is how it has always been done? In some ways, my old blog was in part an effort to call out this kind of behavior, but it really turned into a space like the one I tried to create for my teammates, avoiding the perpetrators and instead building community among those on the receiving end.

I haven't had my "I quit" moment yet in academia (but a really drawn out "I quit" moment in terms of teaching contingently). I'm still here. My decision, now, however centers around what I am going to do about these moments of abuse. I have chosen the opportunity to go back to coaching and create the environment I wanted when I swam, but in a lot of ways, I have more autonomy and a voice sometimes that I do within higher education on these issues. As staff, within the hierarchy, I have little institutional clout. As a "public figure" I have a little more.

So, what am I going to do?

The instinct, for me, is to immerse myself in my research around affect, to understand and combat the environments that allow this kind of behavior to survive and fester. But that's not enough. I have to be able to speak out against what I see, what I have seen, what is perpetuated. I don't know what that looks like yet, but I think it's what comes next.